Keeping Watch
by pennyante
Summary: Kara and Lee maintain fear and their strange fidelity at once. Vignettes/preludes for In the Whole World. K/L


"Military Time"

On New Caprica, every day had twenty-seven hours, forty-one minutes and five seconds. Kara knew it perfectly well—and if she hadn't, the sunrises would have reminded her—but here in Leoben's prison, she endeavored to keep time on the military clock, with its 25-hour days that were supposedly an old inheritance from Kobol.

So yes, it meant she had to ignore this sun. The same sun which she had moved to New Caprica to feel on her face again. The sun that had once awoken her, on one of the first days here, jolting her awake before she even fully remembered what she'd done the night before, glaring down onto the left side of her face.

The right side of it had been pressed against Lee's bare chest, listening to his relentlessly steady heartbeat.

She and Lee belonged to darkness. She knew it. It was why, that day, she had chosen the sunlight. She had made a trade: the dark, vast infinity of space and of what Lee Adama did to her brain, for the bright, finite, manageable contours of Sam Anders and the ground beneath her feet. She had married Sam.

The trade had failed.

So now, here, as Leoben's prisoner, she was ignoring the sun. She focused on her people, on the only ones left who could help. She kept faith with _them_. Sometimes military time meant she slept only during daylight hours, sitting awake all night, staring out the tenement window, straining her eyes to see if any of the lights looked like _Galactica_ or _Pegasus _had jumped in and were peeking down. Like her body as a personal detection system, if she were watchful enough, might be better than all the Cylons' technology.

Kara kept to her schedule as rigidly as she had at her most diligent on the battlestar, maintaining her shifts and her watches, waking up exactly every twenty-five hours on six and a half hours' sleep to run sixty minutes of laps around the living room, twenty minutes of crunches, converting furniture and books into weights, mentally running safety drills, leading protocol reviews, flying CAPs by imagining every detail she could recall of the feel of her Viper controls in her palms, the sight of the contours of the fleet's ships, of the stellar features of this system, of an imagined one where the fleet, somewhere, was hiding.

When Leoben interrupted her sleep schedule for meals, or by coming back from his latest resurrection in the middle of her night's rest, she took it in stride and stuck with the clock she'd chosen. Week to week, she cycled through the New Caprican clock, determinedly paying it no attention. It, the people outside, her husband and the Colonel and Laura Roslin… She couldn't think of them.

Reveille, breakfast, morning briefing, patrols, afternoon briefing, dinner, evening briefing, drinking and card games and night watches… She was there with him. With them. With her family.

_Family. _She liked to believe that the Old Man would come back for her if he could, but she _knew_ Lee would. She knew it. If she hadn't been so much on the ropes, it would have made her feel guilty to acknowledge the secret agreement between them that they'd follow each other to death; her brain would have hidden it from her, put it somewhere out of sight, but she felt so near it, now...

They'd made that agreement well before he'd ever forced her to admit that she loved him. To _yell _it, to yell her darkest secret to the universe. They'd made it, slowly and silently, in the first days after the Cylon holocaust. And she thought that Lee, even now, after what she'd done, would hold to it. He lived on military time, too, and for the same reasons she did. There were certain obligations.

In her mind, she talked to them—to him—over those regulation-hour meals, and meetings, sent her strategic plans for penetrating Cylon defenses up to him as if writing letters that could pierce the atmosphere if she _willed _it hard enough. It was the last thought she had each night—or morning, or afternoon, whenever she was falling asleep—as she drifted away. _He's thinking of me. Right now. He remembers. He remembers. He remembers._

She kept military time, and ignored the sun, and it was how she knew she wasn't alone. It helped her slow down the rate at which she was dying, here.

"In The Fall"

"We can't keep doing this, Apollo," Kara sighed as she stretched her torso up and away from him. She ran a foot up and down his bare calf, preening like a cat in the sunlight streaming in through the window of the old shed they'd taken to meeting up in, behind the airfields. She didn't sound like she meant it. Hell, she didn't feel like she meant it. She had never had a particularly strong relationship with rules.

"You—"

"I know, I know, I said it last time. You said _that_ last time."

Lee adjusted his grip on her hip to pull her back toward him. "I'm not going to walk away so you can marry Zak, Kara. And I'm not going to walk away once you tell Zak it's over, either. And you don't want me to."

"You don't know a damned thing about me—"

He cut her off with a sharp laugh. "Let me tell you three things _about you_. First. You're lying when you say it's over. You _know_ it's not. Second. You're holding onto Zak because you're the softest frakking touch in the world and you can't bear to hurt his feelings because he reminds you of _you_, when you were younger—"

"Who the hell do you think—"

"Third," he breathed, heaving himself up on his hands and breathing softly into her ear, knowing he'd pushed as hard as he could for the moment, "you want me to be nice to you, right now, and you don't know how to ask me for it." He let his lips run over her jaw, let himself trust that this would work out, that he wasn't damning both of them.

It didn't feel like damnation. It felt like the last full days of summer: ripeness, culmination, and piercingly sweet, endless, dark daylight.

So he whispered to her how brave and strong she was with his mouth—she needed to hear it sometimes—and drove her out of her mind with his hands. With his heart, he held the shouts of his conscience at bay.

The sound of Vipers screaming through the sky overhead failed to steal back their stolen hour.

"Control Yourself"

A few hours after escorting a third of her former crewmates into custody on the _Astral Queen_, Kara found herself knocking on the door to Lee's quarters on Colonial One.

He cocked a brow at her when he saw her at the door, but opened it wider and stepped back without question. She raised a bottle of ambrosia—well, knock-off ambrosia, algae-infused—and winked at him. "Mutiny juice," she said. She made the joke, but Lee knew perfectly well that if Felix Gaeta were here, Kara was still angry enough she'd cheerfully strangle him with her bare hands.

The airlock would take care of that in a few days, in any case.

He grabbed a pair of glasses and turned them up on the table with a satisfying _clunk_. She poured and raised her glass. "To…democracy?" Her eyes seemed to be laughing at him, but Lee could see the hysteria just behind them. He didn't think. Just this once. He stood up and opened his arms. "Kara. Come here… please?"

She stood and launched herself at him, knocking him off his feet. He hit his bed at an angle, fell awkardly, but didn't let go, just clutched her harder.

"Shhhh… Take what you need. It's OK."

She wasn't crying, or shuddering, as just about anyone else he knew would be if this storm were sweeping through their hearts. Finally, she opened her mouth, and sank her teeth deep into his shoulder.

He winced; he was pretty sure she'd broken the skin. But he just rubbed his arms up and down her back. "Whatever you need."

He didn't admit that she was giving him the same.

"Dance / Revolution"

They were on their sixth lap around _Galactica_ when she broke down and explained it to him. "I had this vision, OK? Like, serious, full-on hallucination." She was beginning to pant; this was normally where she started to really feel the workouts. Lee had been panting for a while, no surprise. Cardio was definitely in Starbuck's wheelhouse. _Endurance_.

"A hallucination taught you a piano concerto?"

"No. My dad did, years ago. I'm almost sure of it."

"Your… I thought your dad left when you were eight?"

She raised a brow. "Zak told you?"

"No. You did. In that prison cell in Thebes the night—"

"Frak. Seriously?"

He was impatient with her walls. "So your dad taught it to you when were a kid, and you think it's important because…?"

"Because this wasn't just any vision. I mean, I was awake, and in Joe's Bar, and… I know it's not in my head. Gods, Lee, it's like it was one fifth on the radio, somehow—and if you could have seen how the Colonel was looking at me afterwards… Something happened. I know it."

"OK. So play it for me."

"Are you just trying to get out of running the last lap, because, seriously, Apollo—"

He cut her off when he tugged her into the doorway to the hangar deck, through which they'd find Joe's, although it was empty at this hour. "C'mon."

That was the first time Kara played it for Lee, the first of a dozen over the next few days. That first time, when she finished, she looked up. "Well?"

"Well, it's not the most danceable thing I've ever heard…" Lee ventured.

She let that sink in over a long moment, and then Kara cracked up, and the spell the song had over her was broken. For a moment.

She spun back to the piano and started strumming the melody of an old club hit they'd danced to, with Zak, years before. "Dance, Apollo, dance!"

He got to his feet and did just that, and godsdamn, but somehow the man could do what he put his mind to. She didn't know that at this moment, he was dancing to save her romance with the instrument under her fingers. Her love of her father. Her grip on everything else.

Moving her shoulders, she danced along.

"Keeping a Watch"

Every day on New Caprica had twenty-seven hours, forty-one minutes, and five seconds, a fact which Lee was perfectly well aware of because he had set the chronometer on his watch to reflect it, back before the Cylons had even arrived. That had been when he'd been hovering in the air over the new settlement. Watching everyone else begin their lives. Trying to begin a life of his own, with Dee, who had seen his chronometer, seen it and made her judgments.

In her ostentatiously unobtrusive way, she'd said nothing.

Now, looking at his watch, Lee could see that his father and _Galactica_ had jumped away fourteen minutes before to begin the rescue mission. Fourteen endless minutes that he'd been in charge of the "fleet"—which now consisted only of the two thousand or so humans who hadn't had enough capacity for hope left to abandon the icy metal confines of ships in space to settle for a cold promise on land. Fourteen minutes, and he was losing his mind.

Once upon a time, almost a year before, he'd set his watch based on what was left of his own capacity to dream. He hadn't had much; one too-bright morning-after on New Caprica had stripped him of most of it. But he'd yielded to the whimpers that still called from his chest, yielded and despised himself for it. He wanted, if just in one little corner of the _Pegasus—_on his left arm—to live on New Caprican time. So he would know what time she was breaking for lunch, having dinner, settling in for the night. So he could be there.

He knew he couldn't imagine the schedule the Cylons were keeping her to, now—if she was still alive to keep one.

_She has to be alive. There has to still be time_.

They had a secret, unspoken agreement, he and Kara. They'd follow each other to death. And until then, they'd stand back to back, guns blazing, on the very cusp of the universe and take on all comers.

He looked at Dee, then his watch.

He knew he should say something to her, but he grabbed the comm link instead. "_Action stations, action stations…"_

"Out on the Edge of Darkness"

Once, when they'd been small, Lee had let Zak goad him into a fight like this one.

Zak had been mad about something—something their father had said, some mild criticism that had gone all the way to his bones—and he'd blamed Lee. Not because Lee had gotten off scot-free; they both knew Lee took the brunt of their father's criticism. But because Lee _could_ take it.

Dad had shipped out again, and Zak had been an ass for days—had spilled bean soup on Lee's math homework, dropped his toothbrush in the toilet, short-sheeted his bed and stolen the pillow, all the bullshit dreamed of by younger brothers to thoroughly antagonize older ones. Finally, eventually, Zak had gotten what he wanted; Lee'd become angry enough to retaliate. After their brawl, Zak had ended up with a broken arm, and Lee had had a black eye and taped ribs for weeks.

But Zak could live with him again after that, for a while.

Listening to Starbuck goad him into the ring tonight felt the same. _Why are YOU mad at ME? _he wanted to scream. _What the frak gives you the right? I didn't do anything to you. _

_You left me. You rolled out of my arms and into your godsdamned marriage bed. _

_And I _still_ came back for you._

Lee couldn't decide whether he hated Kara more, or himself. That's what he was thinking as her first blow landed.

_Crack_. Her first on his jaw. He clenched his teeth and dug in.

_Thud_. His knuckles dug into her left shoulder, somewhere just above her heart. He noticed. He knew it wasn't a coincidence his hand had chosen to strike there.

And so he stopped his own heart's pitiful yowling and listened to what she hadn't told him.

_Smack_.

You left me to die on New Caprica.

_Thump_.

I frakked up. I always do. You know I do, and you still married Dee. Jackass_._

_Crash_.

I can't do this without you. Please. Please. Please.

Don't make me beg.

They were bleeding so many ways as they fell into each other's arms. Feeling her head, finally, on his shoulder, he slumped against her and dreaded leaving the ring. He'd have to let go, then. It would hurt, again.

He could only tape up his ribcage so many times.

"I Watch the Ships Go Sailing By"

If she'd known that she was going to fly into a maelstrom and disappear, in some ways forever, later that afternoon, Kara might have said a few more words to her husband that morning over breakfast.

He had grown used to the silence, whenever he tried to draw her out, but this morning she was frustrating him.

"You could have sent someone else, you know," he said.

"To… breakfast?" 

"To rescue me. To rescue us on Caprica. You didn't have to make all the grand frakkin' gestures. Save me. Whisk me away. Marry me."

"It wasn't…" She shook her head, tried to clear it, but she'd been in a fog for so long. "No. I had to come." She conscientiously avoided the issue of whether she'd needed to marry him. "I had to save you. I left too many other people behind." Her mind was on them, as it was all too often, these days. "I dropped the ball. I should never have let you up in the air—" She cut herself off abruptly as she realized what she was about to say, who she was actually talking to.

That was when she looked up and met Lee's eyes at the next table. _I know who you couldn't save_, they said. _I know why you did all this, finally. You selfish, stupid coward._

She left her algaecakes half-eaten on her plate. "I'm outta here."

"Big surprise," Anders scoffed, but it was Lee's eyes that knew more than that she was a habitual runner.

They knew what she was running from.

"Habits"

The first moment when Kara was forced to admit that she loved a man, Gaius Baltar was balls-deep inside her, freezing as she moaned another man's name.

"Leeeeeeeeeee_…"_

_Frak._

She shoved away from Baltar, standing up and dragging on her underwear in one motion. A warning not to tell anyone what had happened was on her lips before she realized who she was dealing with. It wasn't exactly a flattering story for him, and this was a man who had always already done that math.

"You could actually have had Captain Adama tonight, I believe," Baltar sprawled back on the bed, throwing the sheet over what remained of his erection and leaning against the headboard. His posture was lazy, but his eyes were watchful as ever. "Why didn't you?"

Kara spoke rapidly, more invested in getting out of here than in the kind of self-censorship she normally practiced. "'Cause I'm not weak. And 'cause you deserve someone like me. Apollo's too squeaky clean." She thought of those afternoons they'd spent together, sweaty and insatiable, in a shed near an airfield in Delphi, a thousand years ago. "Anyway, he wants to be. I might believe in the gods, but he's superstitious as hell—believes in honor, bullshit like that." She blew out a breath. "Good times, Gaius. Good night."

She slipped out of the bunk room and almost ran to the showers. Was there enough water on _Galactica_ to clean that off of her?

Not Gaius Baltar. Lee's name, pouring out of her mouth at the moment she'd lost control of her brain. It clung to her whole body.

She stood, shuddering, as an ocean of water spilled over her. _I'm not weak. I'm not weak. I'm not weak._

"I Would Have Let You Leave"

When Kara woke up in her cell on the third day after Laura Roslin had locked her up in the brig under suspicion that she was a Cylon, she saw there was a note that had been tucked through the bars. "Starbuck," it said on the front, and it was in Lee's writing.

She unfolded it swiftly, her eyes straining in the dim light.

_Kara,_

_I was almost glad to see you were asleep when I got here. If you haven't noticed, there are a lot of things that are hard for me to say._

_Here's one: I didn't let go of you. And I didn't mourn you. I walked around, these last two months, in a rage, distracting myself with business and doing whatever I could to help myself sleep at night. But I couldn't mourn you, because once I was done mourning, you'd be gone. I held onto my pain as hard as I could._

_I let you leave me, but there's no way I could have let you _go. _It's you and me, Starbuck, back to back on the godsdamned cusp of the universe. I don't think I can face the universe without knowing you've got me covered._

_Gods. Fine. You can think I'm being dramatic—think whatever you want. Because you know and I know that we have a pact. Where you go, I go. When you go…_

_So don't do it again, Starbuck. That's an order. I may be retired, but now I outrank you in all kinds of other ways._

_I'll come back to hear more about Earth. How big was it? What color was the water? Did you see its sun?_

_Lee_

Kara could read between all of Lee's lines, so she saw what he'd been trying to say: _My name is Lee Adama…and I…_

She slid down to the floor and leaned against the bars—facing so the guard couldn't see her—and let herself cry and cry.

"The Crush of Veils & Starlight"

In the hours after Kara went missing on the red moon, Lee unlocked his entire secret chest of memories of her, dragging it out from where he'd buried it when his brother died, at the edges of his mind.

It was so strange. So many things had changed when Zak's plane had exploded—holidays and colors and his idea of family and the whole past, as far back as he could remember it—that he had barely noticed that he'd stopped thinking about those dreams. Now, though, now that he had remembered…

He came into the infirmary almost at a run. Sure, he'd already seen her—he'd seen her come out of the Raider—but this was _urgent_. So he tore open the curtain to her "room", saw her, unguarded for once, staring up at the ceiling almost… wistfully? He didn't give himself time to think about it.

"Lee-!"

"I used to have this dream," he said briskly, "before Zak died, that you and I were out taking a walk, and we walked past a store. What kind of store would change—a laundromat, a restaurant, a bank. Once it was that antique mall where you and Zak got that clock—"

"I remember." She did, just not the name of it. No. _Freelanders. _That was it. Zak had dragged her, using some of his usual lines about needing to make her house into _their_ home.

"Anyway, we'd walk by, and you'd say you wanted to stop in, and I'd say, no, we don't have time, we need to get home. Our home—somehow. That we had together." He looked up at the ceiling, not quite able to meet her eyes, even now. Too much of an admission. Too much of a betrayal. And she looked away because this made _two _too many Adama boys who'd wanted a home from her she couldn't offer. "And I'd know that I was right—there was no time—in that, you know, that way you _know_ things are true in dreams? And you'd insist, and we'd fight about it, and then you'd say, it's OK, Apollo, I brought my Viper. I can be my own ride. Go ahead without me, I'm right behind you. I'll probably beat you there."

"But I never came?"

"No." Lee gave a short laugh. "No, you came. I think it was 'cause of my old man, because of how we were raised—the old war movies, you know—but when you came…" He swallowed. "It was always in a Cylon raider. Not a Viper. And I would look out the window and see you hovering out there and be absolutely terrified. And even though I knew it was you, I couldn't stop myself from shooting you out of the sky."

"_Right." _She closed her eyes, let those words sink to join all the other stones at the bottom of her heart. It made sense. He _should_ have wanted to shoot her out of the sky. What she had done to him…

"Kara. Listen to what I'm saying." Her eyes were gigantic, like whole planets covered in a sheen of clouds and rain. He steeled himself. "Thank you. Because of today, I'm not afraid anymore. You came in a Raider, just like in my dream. So I know now, that when you come for me," his even tone said, _and you will come for me_, "Raider or not, I'm not shooting. You hear me?"

She blinked, once, twice, four times, and the planets in her face became eyes again, and she nodded firmly. "I hear you, Apollo."

He left as quickly as he'd come, and she laid back, and felt blindly for the ring on top of her dogtags, and wondered why it didn't seem to burn her fingers as much as it had a few moments before. She took a gulping breath and steeled herself. Everything was already too late; everything that should have happened for them should have happened a long time ago.

He'd been right—there was no time to get home. And wrong. When she came for him, and she would come for him, one day when she could no longer stop herself, he should _absolutely_ shoot her out of the sky.


End file.
